Thomas Friedman: Green Is the New Red, White and Blue

Thomas Friedman is a three time Pullitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist and the author of National Bestseller The World Is Flat. When he takes a position on a major geopolitical issue people usually take notice. Just this week Mr. Friedman penned an article entitled "The Power of Green." Friedman's arguments are not all new, but he has an amazing knack for synthesizing ideas and giving them new energy. The backbone of this piece is something we are all vaguely aware of (thanks in no small part to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth): if the world doesn't start limiting its carbon emissions now, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere will double by midcentury and the earth's climate system will go "haywire."

The good news is America has more reasons than ever to start now.

1. Geopolitical Reasons: Green = A Sustainable Future. We can reduce our carbon emissions all we want but the 3 billion people coming on to the world economic stage in Braizil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) need to housed, clothed and fed and currently carbon is the cheapest way to fuel that growth. The US grew "dirty" so we can't expect the BRIC countries to grow clean if it is costlier. We need renewable energy to reach the "China Price" (as cheap as coal) in order to ask the BRIC countries to grow clean. To do that we need to take the lead in developing and implementing the technologies to make it a reality.
   
2. Patriotic Reasons: Green = Win the War on Terror. America's addiction to oil means we are financing both sides of the War on Terror: our tax dollars pay for our troops and our petrodollars enrich the Saudis and Iranians who in turn finance the export of fundamentalist Islam. That support tilts "the Islamic world in a more intolerant direction" and extends our War on Terror to younger generations. In other words using less foreign oil will quite literally dry up much of the funding for extreme fundamentalists.
   
3. Capitalist Reasons: Green = Profits: There are huge economic incentives to being the world's leading supplier of renewable energy, and it feeds right in to our strength as a capitalist society. We can be the world economic leader on clean energy, and supply the "technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet." Already Wal-Mart, GE and others are investing billions in clean energy solutions. But, the free market alone cannot sustain the kind of investment needed to create the solutions. We need our government to support the drive.

So what does this all mean. Well Mr. Friedman thinks it means that to be "green" no longer means being "liberal" or "tree-hugging", today being "green" is really all about being geostrategic, patriotic and capitalistic. Now that is a type of green that can appeal to the flag-waving American masses.